Melissa Loop uses her travels to explore notions of authenticity, place, and spirituality through our experiences of other cultures. Follow the Moon is inspired by her trips to Central America in 2012 and 2015 when she visited ancient Mayan sites. While her paintings are based on reality, the compositions are purposefully invented in an attempt to recreate rare moments of spiritual transcendence one encounters when taking a pilgrimage to a sacred place. With this particular group of paintings, Loop focused on exploring the space between imagination, reality, spiritual transcendence, and dreams. By doing this, she is weaving a tale of a pilgrim coming out of a deep sorrow and finding the origin of life.

Tie Yourself to Me, 2017, Synthetic polymer on panel, 18 x 24″

In Voiceatscript, Ute Bertog continues to explore the tenuous relationship between abstraction and language in her paintings to address themes of communication and its failure. For Voiceatscript she focuses on a deeply felt sense of speechlessness. Being speechless and without words to articulate one’s thoughts and opinions is seen either as a defiant gesture or – more often – as a sign of powerlessness. In order to regain a sense of power Bertog then reaches for readymade texts, quotes, and cliches as a starting point for her paintings, only to lose them again in the painting process. The goal is to introduce the necessary space for questions, imagination and play to take hold to freely renegotiate original content.

Rosalux Gallery is pleased to present two solo shows by Minneapolis artists Laura Stack and Melissa Loop. In Fluere, Stack’s abstract ink paintings suggest an amalgam of the natural and the synthetic where shapes morph into odd, though vaguely familiar forms and ink patterns bloom, dissolve, and disperse. In Fabricated Real, Loop’s landscape paintings use her travels to Mayan ruins in Central America as a subject to explore notions of how we form assumptions about authenticity, place, and spirituality through our explorations and ill-informed ideas of other cultures.
Artist’s website: Laurastackart.com and Melissaloop.com

Rosalux Gallery

Melissa Loop: Outside Looking In Ute Bertog: Reading the Story

June 6-June 28, 2015

Opening reception June 6th, 6-10 pm

Rosalux Gallery is pleased to present two solo shows by local artists Melissa Loop and Ute Bertog. Loop’s landscape paintings combine misrepresentations, dreams, and nostalgia of the South Seas through the lens of an outsider. In ‘Reading the story’ Bertog explores the remarkable human ability to craft stories and meaning out of the smallest bits and pieces. This will mark Bertog’s first show at the gallery. Join the artists for a reception on June 6th from 6-10pm. The show will run until June 28th.

Ute Bertog’s work is an exploration of communication and its many moments of failure. Refusing to see these as purely negative, Bertog uses those moments in a more generative way to create opportunities for meaning to slip into various guises, ready to be negotiated. Her process starts out with reading and extracting words out of pre-existing print material, which are then transferred into paint and further revised until the ability to read is either severely undermined or completely taken away. This is where imagination and play come in and readily fill in any gaps, offering the chance to reinterpret original content.

Melissa Loop uses the guise of romantic landscape painting to explore an assumed idea of place. After immersing herself in the French Polynesia for five weeks, Loop was able to carve out an understanding of place beyond a postcard. The use of Loop’s fragmented, self critical, and nostalgic ideas of the French Polynesia confront the fantasy and reality of the exotic and the ways in which tourism and cultural stereotypes are shaping cultural preservation and identity of this faraway place.